Rodale Gives A Facelift To Organic Gardening

The million subscribers to Rodale Press's Organic Gardening, the nation's leading garden magazine, will find a new-looking product in their mailboxes this month.

Rodale has upgraded its pulp booklet to a standard-size magazine with glossy pages, more color pictures and more writing.

The changes, which will cost $10 million over the next five years, are aimed at staying ahead of the competition just when national interest in gardening is expected to blossom, according to the magazine's publisher, Bennett Zucker.

"Gardening is about to take off due to the sheer force of demographics," said the 37-year-old Zucker. "Gardeners of today are more visually orientated and we reached a point where we have to show all of gardening in as great a detail and color as gardening should be."

As Baby Boomers enter the age at which gardening becomes the most popular hobby, Zucker said, more publishers are vying for that market.

Flower and Garden, the second-biggest gardening magazine with about 575,000 subscriptions, is adding more color and larger spreads, said a spokesman for Mid America Publishing of Kansas City, Mo.

Taunton Press of Newton, Conn., which publishes several high quality do- it-yourself magazines, has just introduced Fine Gardening to 60,000 charter subscribers, a spokeswoman said.

Organic Gardening has seen a decline from its peak subscription of 1.3 million a few years ago. But it remains the second-largest publication in the Rodale empire, behind Prevention, a health magazine with2.85 million subscribers.

"OG has been the dominant magazine in its field," said Zucker. "And as befits a leader, we have to catch up with the times."

J.I. Rodale, the founder of Rodale Press, started publishing OG in 1942 to serve World War II victory gardeners. Because of paper shortages, he was forced to put out a small booklet using scrap paper left over from the printing of the Saturday Evening Post.

After the war the company stayed with the six-by-nine-inch format because it had a good deal with the printing house, according to Robert Rodale, chairman of Rodale Press and OG editor.

"But we were moving against the tide," Rodale wrote in the March issue, the last small OG to roll off the press.

And then last year, National Gardening magazine, a major OG competitor in the area of edible gardening, began taking advertisers.

"It was not so much a fear of losing advertisers to them but seeing the market fragmented in ways we would rather not see," Zucker said. "More likely we could lose some readers to a magazine like that."

"Many of our members used to get OG and have switched to us," said Nancy Flinn, media relations director for National Gardening, which has 200,000 subscribers and is published by the National Gardening Association in Burlington, Vt.

OG advertisers for years have been urging Rodale Press to modernize the magazine, said Zucker.

"They need space to show and tell," he said, adding that advertising rates will increase in the new OG.

Zucker sees auto advertising as a "terrific category" for future ad growth because many gardeners have pick-up trucks and many more of them have several vehicles in their mostly suburban families.

The more visual OG should also attract more health food advertisers and makers of food preparation equipment, according to Zucker.

Although the word "organic" over the years has assumed less prominence in the magazine title, Rodale Press doesn't plan to phase it out or replace it with a less controversial word, such as regenerative. Zucker said "organic" has become a mainstream word and is "becoming a real selling point" in the consumer movement that increasingly loathes chemicals in its food.

OG also is starting to emphasize flower and landscape gardening, as are other magazines, according to Rodale publicity manager Ben Dunlap Jr.

Renewal subscription rates for OG will go up $1 and new subscriptions will go up $2 to help pay for the changes.

"Right now we are comfortable with 1 million circulation," the publisher said. "Depending on how advertisers and readers react to the new format, we will certainly be open to growth."

He declined to discuss profitability. "Suffice it to say, there is a good market for this redesigned magazine that is worth investing $10 million. Obviously we expect to make some money with this thing."